How Secure Are FPGAs?


The unique hybrid software/hardware nature of FPGAs makes them tempting targets for cyberattacks, while also enabling them to rebuff attacks and change the attack surface before significant damage can be done. But it's becoming increasingly challenging to address all the potential vulnerabilities. FPGAs are often included in larger systems, each with their own unique attack vectors as well a... » read more

Side-Channel Attack Protection For Quantum Safe Cryptography


A recent Reuters Special Report discussed the race between the US and China to protect digital assets and communications from the potential threat posed by quantum computers. Cryptographically relevant quantum computers, those that are powerful enough to crack existing public key-based encryption methods, could compromise military, economic, and personal information across the globe. While the ... » read more

Enabling Long-Lasting Security For Semiconductors


There’s no doubt we live in a world where technology is highly intertwined within our daily lives. It has become pervasive in our homes, our automobiles and, critically, at our work. With so many access points into our lives, we’ve not only become extremely vulnerable to data collection, but more devastatingly, hackers. Today, hackers have more time, resources, available training and motiva... » read more

RISC-V Micro-Architectural Verification


RISC-V processors are garnering a lot of attention due to their flexibility and extensibility, but without an efficient and effective verification strategy, buggy implementations may lead to industry problems. Prior to RISC-V, processor verification almost became a lost art for most semiconductor companies. Expertise was condensed into the few commercial companies that provided processors or... » read more

SAP: A Secure Low-Latency Protocol for Mitigating High Computation Overhead in WI-FI Networks


The increase in popularity of wireless networks in industrial, embedded, medical and public sectors has made them an appealing attack surface for attackers who exploit the vulnerabilities in network protocols to launch attacks such as Evil Twin, Man-in-the-middle, sniffing, etc., which may result in economic and non-economic losses. To protect wireless networks against such attacks, IEEE 802.11... » read more

AI Accelerator Architectures Poised For Big Changes


AI is driving a frenzy of activity in the chip world as companies across the semiconductor ecosystem race to include AI in their product lineup. The challenge now is how to make AI run faster, use less energy, and to be able to leverage it from the edge to the data center — particularly with the rollout of large language models. On the hardware side, there are two main approaches for accel... » read more

Autonomous Vehicles: Not Ready Yet


The swirl of activity around L4 and L5 vehicles has yet to result in a successful demonstration of an autonomous vehicle that can navigate the streets of a city or highway without incident, and there is a growing body of real-world data showing that much work still needs to be done. Robo-taxi trials in big cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and soon San Diego, are proving that autono... » read more

Understanding Memory Protection Units


Let’s talk about the various security measures we take to protect our homes. We use locks, install security cameras to detect any suspicious activities, etc., all to safeguard our loved ones and valuable possessions. In similar sense, the tiny microcontrollers inside our devices have protection units (PU) that safeguard the precious resource: memory. One of the most important types of prote... » read more

Securing AI/ML Training And Inference Workloads


AI/ML can be thought about in two distinct and essential functions: training and inference. Both are vulnerable to different types of security attacks and this blog will look at some of the ways in which hardware-level security can protect sensitive data and devices across the different AI workflows and pipelines. The security challenges encountered with AI/ML workloads can be addressed by i... » read more

Data Leakage In Heterogeneous Systems


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Paul Chou, senior director of security architecture at NVIDIA, to discuss data leakage in heterogeneous designs. What follows are excerpts of that one-on-one interview, which was held in front of a live audience at the Hardwear.io conference. SE: We think about hardware in terms of a chip, but increasingly there is data moving through different systems... » read more

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